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Goodbye

Just wanted to say goodbye and thank all the people who helped me with PBP the last 10 years. I'm pulling the plug on it and PIC microprocessors and going over to the t other side: Arduino hell.

Someone has really missed the mark regarding PBP and PICs. My PBP and Mecanique IDE are the best, most powerful, and easiest software to use, which I have been doing with my Lab x1 development system. I had a MikroElektronica system as well but used PBP for development instead of Mikro Basic. I sold the Mikro board when I saw the writing on the wall. I also got rid of my stock of about 1000 ICs: TTL and CMOS, and all my 555 and 556 chips.

I tried to find something that would allow me to program Arduino family MCUs (I'm talking boards like UNO, Leonardo, DUE, etc) using PBP and/or the IDE but no one has facilitated this operation. MELabs says nothing is in development. Too bad: there's a ton of money to be made if someone could make the link. Instead I had to learn that crappy C++ language, spending 3/4 of my time fixing typos or trying to figure out what the cryptic error message is telling me.

Why did I change? Because I like the idea of writing code and downloading to a development board that will also be the controller board. With PBP and PICS, I could do the development but didn't have a board to run: I had to MAKE that board. I did this a number of times and all boards eventually worked but all this took time to do. With Arduino for example, I can blink an LED 2 minutes after hooking up a board, then take the board and put it into service somewhere.

I had tons of inventory of PIC MCUs and 6 large binders for the 6 MCUs I used. They were heavily noted and had lots of stickies in them (like the PBP manual) because in 10 years I did a lot of crap!!! I threw out all the documentation, including all the laminated cheat sheets I made for processors.

Arduino has a large following of users. There is an application for everything under the sun. eBay sells a 37 sensor kit for Arduino (just plug in), for about $15. I now have more Arduino parts (sensors, relays, motors, LEDs, etc) and Arduino MCU boards than ever. I have 10 UNO's, a bunch of Leonardos, a dozen Minis, a Due. Some robotic kits I bought all had Arduino boards and "shields" (I have a bunch of shields too).

I looked at the Amicus product by Crownhill and that is EXACTLY what I talking about. THIS is what could have taken Arduino on if the price and availability would have been better. Meanwhile I've been churning out projects like crazy with Arduino, despite it's terrible front end (you can't even print from the IDE!).

So. No more PICs. No more PBP. (I'll keep it on my computer so I can show others how it great it was). I'll get rid of my LabX1 and programmer and other related hardware and cables I made up. I'll give away all my PIC chips (over 100 of them).

Re: Goodbye

Why did I change? Because I like the idea of writing code and downloading to a development board that will also be the controller board. With PBP and PICS, I could do the development but didn't have a board to run: I had to MAKE that board. I did this a number of times and all boards eventually worked but all this took time to do. With Arduino for example, I can blink an LED 2 minutes after hooking up a board, then take the board and put it into service somewhere.

in 10 years you never heard of icsp or bootloaders or even curiosity boards ? all of which do exactly that .

Re: Goodbye

Since you had to learn the new C-based language anyways, you could have learned XC8 and taken advantage of all the features MPLABX offers, which probably blows Arduino away (from what I know about both). Plus, like Richard said, Microchip (and 3rd party suppliers) offer demo boards, development boards, and other cool tools to help. I like PIC because I CAN put it on any PCB board I develop. I'm not tied to integrating an entire module, just the processor. Good luck with your new endeavors, I hope Arduino serves you well.

Re: Goodbye

You mention that you make your board.
So just make ones that are compatible with arduino. It should be really easy, I think eagle have library with board layout and connectors.
So just put your favorite pic in middle, fanout pins, add 7805 or what ever vreg you want.
And you can get best from both world...
Anyway, good luck.

Re: Goodbye

Lester, Please keep me in mind if you are going to UNLOAD any of the current Amicus boards. I heard talk of you maybe laying out a new one. I have been using the few I have purchased at work the last few months and have incorporated them into a few test systems. I currently load them with PIC18F27K40's running PBP3.1 with a boot loader. Beats the heck out of Arduino's. I also like the way you layed out the board with the ports. I sure beats the PICAXE layout. Thanks for all you do....

Re: Goodbye

@Lester:

Does the Amicus web site work? It says that it does not work.
Availability and price is a serious factor for a product success. If one has to pay, say 20 euros for the product and 30 to get it by post or courier, I doubt it that orders will come. Unfortunately, China is to far away in this.

@queenidog:

With PBP or Proton Basic, you do things really fast and easy. And they can be used for professional projects too. With Arduino this is not true, as many of the libraries are made by hobbists and may crash or work but with errors.

True that it has a wide base with a lot of lib's and many really cheap shields especially from China, but the question is, can you trust all these things? Other than the easy of use and programming.

Re: Goodbye

You all miss the real point.

PBP is dying not because there is no interest from the people, but because of major personalities left. Those personalities were helping in here with coding, examples and most of the times, they have spend many hours to explain to newbies and hobbyist the basics. That was the selling point for PBP.

Now i feel like there are only 2 or 3 persons would really like to help, and all the others are looking to make money.

If i had to start now with microcontrolllers, i would go to Arduino, because as a hobbyist i need to do what i ask for in a matter of short of time and fast as hell.

PBP offers the simplicity with a wonderful IDE.

I have no choice to leave or stay. I do not make leaving out of this.

This is only my opinion and as i feel like a hobbyist. I do make simple things for my home, and for my kinds.

If the developers were smart enough to understand the money income from the hobbyist market, i think PBP would be the top of the line IDE of all times.

There are little documented and categorized examples, and all the others are here and there with broken information.

Re: Goodbye

The book of DT's , i think it is also a part of your wonderful job. It looks like a STAR in the darkness.

But comparing those examples to ARDUINO expanded libraries, which every day there is an update to any bug or additional info to the current ones. It is not comparable.

Everywhere on the internet there is a help file, a help library and start up code for each application.

Anyway now it is late to talk about all these. My luck of knowledge and experience is not enough to make comments. I only said my opinion as a hobbyist. What i receive from this forum as a user is that there are only 3 people running like hell, to cover all the user's needs, and at the end of the day they are fed up to give the right info and positive directions.

Re: Goodbye

Now i feel like there are only 2 or 3 persons would really like to help, and all the others are looking to make money

I have never seen anyone really ask for money here, but expecting libraries to be produced for no reward so you can hobby away with
minimal effort is a big ask. i'm always prepared to help but want to see a genuine effort beforehand. just asking for code won't cut it .
I feel that my code could be updated and make better use of the packet engine. if I scrap the backwards combability requirement and maybe even use a small fixed length payload it could be simplified a bit too. I managed to learn a few new tricks bouncing ideas off mike k8lh on the nokia lcd project so these things aren't reward less if you collaborate with the right people . I'm open to suggestion.
nb.
even if some sort of lib is created you realise of course that pbp has no native spi commands . I would expect it to use
some asm and USERCMDS , you have shied away from these things in the past and are you even prepared
to upgrade to pbp3 ?

ARDUINO expanded libraries, which every day there is an update to any bug or additional info to the current ones

don't believe that at all , many libs have major defects that are never addressed. the rfm12b lowpower labs library has never been fixed and
has major bugs just waiting to bite the novice [bugs are often alluded to in the forums, seldom described adequately, seldom fixed]

Re: Goodbye

For me I tend to lurk around this forum less frequent than I used to. I've not used my EasyPIC5 board to program PICs via PB Pro for a few years now. The last project I worked on (hobby project) was Arduino based because it had readily available library files that suited the modern hardware (TFT screens) I wanted to use. Yes I too found I was spending more time sorting out syntac errors and typos etc, and the structure seemed alien after using basic for so many years, but everything in life is swings and roundabouts. Yes if funds permitted upgrading to PB3 which might have made things easier, but my personal circumstances has meant that I've never been able to justify the upgrade cost which would have included a new EasyPIC board to support modern PICs to make use of the functions PB3 offer.

There was a similar thread http://www.picbasic.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=21146 I started a couple of years back and since then I've noticed less and less posts on the forum. I'm guessing that with more and more one board computers coming out that offer far more than an Arduino or a basic PIC people are moving away from the whole project development side of things, where PCBs are designed and built around the PIC, which for me was all part of the fun.

I would agree that it's the people that make this forum, and sadly more and more of the core experienced members have moved away. The loss of DT impacted the forum immensely, and may have been the turning point for the decline. His library of include files filling the gaps left in PBPro and making things a lot more easy to use and efficient. Only a handful of old members still regularly post (Richard, Henrik, Ioannis etc) and should they frequent the forum less and less then the forum will simply gather cobwebs as an archive.

Its a shame things have got in this situation as BASIC is for a lot of people easy to pick up and understand, but IMO PBP has slipped in to decline and has now been left behind. Before Arduino became as main stream as it is now, MikroElectronika was PBP main competition, and they continue to support new hardware both physically through their main development boards and add on modules, but also in their compilers. PBP was slow to follow suit and as mentioned, been left way behind to a point now where it is too costly to catch up.

Re: Goodbye

Dumb question. Is Arduino similar to a $50 stamp and is the processor available in its self for $2.00 or so or do all Arduino projects require a $50 board with the supporting circuitry? Also don't forget Meliane as one of the supporting members lost as time went on.

Re: Goodbye

The Arduino hardware is simply a microcontroller (an 8-bit Atmel job in its original form) with a bootloader mounted on a somewhat standardized form factor PCB with headers. There are many different versions of "Arduino" based on many different microcontrollers, from 8 all the way to 32 bits I believe.

It's not running an interpreter but compiled/assembled code from the Arduino IDE (which I believe is built upon the gcc compiler). You can download the bootloader and flash it into a blank microcontroller using a device programmer (which can actually be another Arduino) and it "becomes" an Arduino.

So no, the Arduino is not similar to a BASIC Stamp (which is running a propritary interpreter) and you can buy blank microcontrollers from "anywhere" and program the Arduino bootloader into them yourself.

Re: Goodbye

It's not running an interpreter but compiled/assembled code from the Arduino IDE (which I believe is built upon the gcc compiler). You can download the bootloader and flash it into a blank microcontroller using a device programmer (which can actually be another Arduino) and it "becomes" an Arduino.

that's pretty right but if you step away from the Arduino standards things get interesting.
I made a prototype pid based damper controller to regulate room temp on woodheaters all good on Arduino board uno atmega328 . for production I thought I would power it from 3.3v and use int osc to save components . turns out atmega328 won't run at 16mhz at that voltage had to drop back to 8mhz . then the boot loader needs to be replaced
. then could not get reliable loads using int osc , so I had to buy a programmer . then I thought what am I gaining over the pic environment , exactly nothing
xc8 and mcc is just lovely
ps. nearly forgot
when the load fails some times the config fuses get corrupted and the chips have to reprogrammed with a hv programmer they cannot be flashed by an other Arduino
I binned a few till I discovered that little gem

Re: Goodbye

Not just any AVR MCU you like I think. Only those supported.

Yes, of course. I didn't mean it could be any 8-bit ATMEL just that the original Arduino is based on an 8-bit ATMEL processor. Obviously you need to use a microcontroller for which support exists in the Arduino environment. The cool thing of course is that "anyone" can add support for devices to the environment which I believe is why you now can program the ESP8266 directly from the Arduino IDE.

I've not used an Arduino for anything. All I've ever done with the IDE is flashing an Openlog blackbox with its firmware.

Of course there are limitation, problems, issues and bugs - as is always the case :-)

Re: Goodbye

Originally Posted by Normnet

Dumb question. Is Arduino similar to a $50 stamp and is the processor available in its self for $2.00 or so or do all Arduino projects require a $50 board with the supporting circuitry? Also don't forget Meliane as one of the supporting members lost as time went on.

Norm

You can pick up an Arduino Mega2560 board for around £10, and you can also pick up just the chip (probably for around the same amount) but the package if the chip does not make it practical to program it and then use that in a custom designed PCB as you would a PIC. As Ioannis has mentioned, the platform is not aimed at the professional developer

I agree that Meliane was also a good contributor, but there were also a lot of others, and I could be here for hours if I included everyone in that tribute, and most have since moved on.

Re: Goodbye

Originally Posted by Scampy

You can pick up an Arduino Mega2560 board for around £10, and you can also pick up just the chip (probably for around the same amount) but the package if the chip does not make it practical to program it and then use that in a custom designed PCB as you would a PIC. As Ioannis has mentioned, the platform is not aimed at the professional developer

I agree that Meliane was also a good contributor, but there were also a lot of others, and I could be here for hours if I included everyone in that tribute, and most have since moved on.

You are saying its not practical to program an Arduino supported chip and place it into a custom designed PBC as you would a PIC?
If so is it common for Arduino projects to be made up of jumpered development modules to make up the final project?

Re: Goodbye

Originally Posted by Normnet

You are saying its not practical to program an Arduino supported chip and place it into a custom designed PBC as you would a PIC?
If so is it common for Arduino projects to be made up of jumpered development modules to make up the final project?

To a degree yes. The ATMEGA 2560 is an 8 bit micro running at 16mhz, with 256 KB of program space, but its in a 100 pin TQFP package which makes programming and soldering to a custom hobby PCB more of a challenge compared to an 8 bit PIC which is in a DIP or SOIC package.

I've just ported a project that was originally developed around an 18F based PIC in DIP package. I developed a custom PCB with all the supporting components on it and then would program the PIC via my EasyPIC5 and then place that into the board. Porting this to the Ardiumo based platform the custom PCB had the majority of the supporting components on it, but the board was designed to plug directly into the header pins on the Mega2560 board, like a large custom shield (as can be seen here testing the TFT screen). The mega was a cloan purchased for £11 from Amazon, and cost less than the individual ATMEGA 2560 chip on its own.

Re: Goodbye

Re: Goodbye

For 3 simpler $25 PIC 8 bit plug in modules see Microchip Direct and do a search for PIM and check development tools then 8 bit. Probably not a lot of 8 bit due to they are available in DIP packages for easier prototyping.

Re: Goodbye

Thanks for all your replies. I wasn't going to come back but I was curious if anyone was agreeing with me...and some did.

I just bought 6 Arduino UNO boards for $12 (CAD) each, all taxes and shipping included. (They were shipped from Canada, but no doubt made in China). These are genuine UNO's made to the specification demanded by Arduino. As such it has a boot loader installed on it and it's just plug and play. I made an ultrasonic scanner using the inexpensive HC-SR04 and an UNO. How easy was it? In under 15 minutes I had one working, using the built in libraries and example code. then I started tweaking it with my limited knowledge of C++ at the time. How would this have been done with a PIC development system and PBP? I likely would have to write the code (with Arduino libraries it was very simple, like 5 lines of code), I would have to set the fuses and all that other overhead PICs require that Arduino takes care of. Once running, I would then have to make a board to have it standalone and I would have to provide an on-board power supply or converter. With the Arduino I downloaded the short program through USB, took the unit (with little breadboard on top) to another location, provided 12 volts from a Walwart and voila! There it goes. I added an I2C display later, again something that took very little time despite not using I2C before.

My current project uses 7-16 bit I2C expanders lighting 110 RGB LEDs. Each LED is addressable. Using the UNO there are only 5 wires interfacing to my project: 3 PWM DIO (so I can fade any light using PWM) for the RGB, and 2 wires for I2C, clock and data. I made a low power "model" that the UNO was quite capable of driving. I'm up to 16 pages of code to display the various patterns and have TONS of space left.

I've been using Arduino for over a year and have not had to update anything. It is very stable. When there is an update to a library, it's usually for more functionality (eg the Wire library for I2C and the Ultrasonic library for the SR04) than for bug fixes.

Having said that, the Arduino IDE is a bunch of crap! Little functionality. No debugger, I can't even PRINT my code. For that I have to cut and paste into Notepad++. The compiler is 10x SLOWER than the PBP compiler. THIS is why I was hoping I could use PBP, to eliminate those disadvantages. I'm sure Dave Taylor (MELabs) could have come up with something.

I've got 3 robots using Arduinos, and my desk has 3 Arduinos connected to 3 MORE projects. No more waiting for PCB to be made and discover the mistakes I made making them. Create something with Arduino and use the board in final stage.

The photo I attached shows a breadboard of the I2C interfaces for my display. The green board is one I had made. Yes, I had to make a board, but not the controller, seen at bottom right (Arduino UNO).

Re: Goodbye

I tried Amtel Studio 7 which is a very good alternative to the basic Arduino IDE, and offers a lot of extra tools.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I too made the switch because you can get up and running on the arduino platform very quickly and have something running using existing examples and library files. Once you have those examples running, it's normally an east task to modify the example to use it to perform the functions your want. As mentioned I wanted to use a TFT screen for the next version of my thermostat project that originated back in 2009 and was based on an 16F877 and 4 x 20 LCD (and I couldn't have done that without DT and Hentiks help). It would have been a lot of hard work and beyond my expertise to write the code in PB or ASM in order to get it to work, yet on the arduino it was displaying text in around 20 minutes of hooking the screen up and loading the example code. I then played with the commands to make the screen more relevant to the project, and then added an example code for reading an 18B20 sensor and displaying the temperature on the screen... by the end of the evening I had the time and temperature displayed on the screen along with a few additional variables... It makes it so easy to develop projects, but as mentioned, it's base around using these boards (uno, nano, mega etc) at the heart and stacking plug in modules (shields) into them. Where as programming PICs often results in a single custom designed PCB that the PIC plugs into.

It's really a shame that PBP didn't keep up with the pace and support more upto date hardware with standalone include files....

Re: Goodbye

You and I are on the same wavelength. I remember your name from previous posts I made when I was a PIC user.
I think MikroElektronika would be the way to go. They have the best development system ever made (I had one), with support for their Basic, C++, etc. They also have "modules" though not as extensive as Arduino chaps. I didn't like the Mikro because the Basic was too structured, yet I have to adhere to that structure with my Arduino C++ !! Who knew? Despite that, Arduino is still the better "system" for quick development. I too added LCDs to my repertoire and use the same codes in most of my software for troubleshooting. Also, since even the lowly UNO has dedicated lines for I2C (clock and data), I have now migrated to I2C capable LCDs. Only 4 wires (inc power and ground) required to the LCD now instead of that ribbon cable mess we are used to.

Re: Goodbye

We use Arduino as a tool to quickly check out sensors and other components. It's great for making blinky lights, but it's terrible for learning embedded systems programming. All you're doing is running programs and libraries that someone else wrote, no one knows how they work, and it's almost impossible to track down all the nested routines and libraries that are called for even the simplest tasks.

We don't use PB very much anymore, but we invested in PB3 to help support the product and stay up to date. When we found that none of our existing programs would compile with it (getting error messages that said "unspecified error" didn't help) we decided it wasn't worth spending the time to get it all running. Our PIC development is now all done in C, and we dropped back to 6.1 for the quick test routines.

Re: Goodbye

Hmm.. how do you suppose any commercial product could have ever competed with free development environments and compilers?
From my point of view it was about time to quit developing PBP about the time Arduino became a thing,
not that I ever have, or ever will use one, so long as proper C platforms are also free.

I don’t think anyone is surprised. New generation controllers started arriving long ago, but without any support.
After ten years, and having to learn a new language anyway, you might as well adopt a real IDE & compiler for whatever mcu of choice.

PBP was never going to become an Arduino like platform because it’s an expensive commercial product,
but I wouldn’t even compare the two for what they are (or were) in their time.
The Arduino platform hides what you don’t need to know (which is actually what you do need to know), and shields serve to shield people from learning any electronics,
At the end of the day, many so called hobbyists get to plug one board into another, and get to say they made something.
That’s why Arduino represents the dilution of two hobbies to me.

The worst thing about PBP is the manual, which tells you how not to use it, and for me, the best thing was a good avenue to learning assembler,
for which, the last few remaining popular low resource controllers, are probably going to be the last reason to ever do so.

Re: Goodbye

Well boy, let me jump into this thread with my experience. As a pure hobbist, I moved to raspberry 3
And I have forgotten pbp3 and pics. Don't know why arduino never attracted me.
With raspberry and linux I had to learn python language, but now I am happy to have done it! The few project I have put together with this new hardware, are beyond anything I could ever dream last year using pics and pbp3. So, now and then I pop into the forum to see if something new happens but sadly I see less and less activity all the time. What a pity!

Re: Goodbye

Alberto,

not all tools are the solution to every problem. If you want just to write a few lines of code and run the code then OK. But you have a full featured computer to blink a led or do some other simple tasks.

Maybe I am seeing this from pure economic-technical aspect, but if one wants to do something in big scale, sure cannot rely on such platforms.

As already said, all these are very good to learn to walk. Then, if you feel ready, you have to run to compete others and these platforms (arduino, raspberry etc) are not the right shoes for it.

Re: Goodbye

My approach to moving upward & onward is to learn to use XC8 and MPLAB X. Bought a couple books and have been devoting just a few hours per week learning. The advantage I see is access to all of the MPLAB X tools (like Microchip Code Configurator; MCC for short), simulator, debug, and the various code libraries that abound. Furthermore, the Proteus Studio hasn't kept up with PBP3 and no longer works very well. However, it is fully compatible with XC8.

We are blessed by having so many wonderful options available. Imagine attempting any of the projects you've done in the past 2 years using the tools available in 1995 (UV light to erase the PIC, Assembly programming, multiple pieces of software & hardware to do what is bundled into just one of each now...). I encourage anybody interested in trying something new to have fun. It may not work out, but I bet you learn a whole lot; principles that would help you better with PBP3, and/or whatever you decide to try next. Most of all, enjoy yourself. Few of us use these tools professionally, so it probably isn't that important. Spend some time with whatever you decide to try. You won't "get it" in a day or three. There will be frustrations. And remember, no single platform will be all things to all folks.

Re: Goodbye

Regarding the comments about having a full featured single board computer to blink LEDs, but that I'm sorry to say is what people want these days. The days where programming a PIC and then using strip board to build a project with supporting timing xtal and associate discrete components has sadly passed. I'm talking about the hobbyist hear, where often than not all they want to do is plug in board X to board Y and load up a sample script and then let it do its thing. For me the Arduino language was very alien after BASIC but I picked it up by cutting and pasting bits of sample code for each device (RTC, TFT, DHT11 etc) to make up the full code for my project, and learnt by debugging the code. It was quick (compared to attempting the same - if at all possible - with PBP) and cheap. But then where plug in boards are concered, MikroElectronika did that decades ago with their EasyXXX development boards, perfecting it with the latest versions where the small modules plug directly into the development board.

The problem is as others have said, PBP has been left behind. I visit this forum daily and sometimes it's weeks between posts in the PBP section. 5,6,8 years back it was sometimes hard to keep up with the posts on all the topics there was that may members contributing. Someone said that what do people expect, PBP is a commercial product and can't compete with an open source platform such as the Arduino, but then again MikroElectronika is also a commercially based product, but they appear to have kept their hardware and software up to date and cater for modern devices as the hardware came out (TFT's for example where simple include files do the basics, or you can use a GUI interface tool to produce the code). I don't know how MikroElectronica compare to MelLabs in terms of size, (Is it just Lester or is/was there a team behind it), but they seem to be the goto platform for the hobbyist who still wants to program in BASIC.

Re: Goodbye

Could I ask what books you bought

in theory "C" is "C" no matter what the platform ,so any book on C basics will get you going.
learning the IDE is the real stumbling block , the xc8 user guide is essential reading
I started with a curiosity board and worked through the example code that comes with it.

it would be nice to see an xc8 support group established here on this forum , a path to enhancing "pic" knowledge and development may keep things going

Re: Goodbye

Thanks Guys,

Just downloaded and installed XC8 and also found a copy of the C Programming Language in PDF format and downloaded that. Need to buy a tree now for the printer so I can get hard copies of the manuals to read in my luch break at work.